Honey Trap

Chapter One

Violetta

"Who's my new mark?" I asked, huffing out a breath of cool air as I plopped down on the couch. Leave it to Nikolai to keep the AC on full blast in the middle of freaking October. Sure, it wasn't below freezing yet—but fifty degrees was too cold to warrant the air conditioner.

I shouldn't be surprised. Nikolai liked it cold. It made him feel like he was back home in Russia or something, even though the guy moved to the United States when he was a toddler. He'd probably tell me to zatknis', chert voz'mi. Or, to our non-Russian speakers, something along the lines of shut-the-fuck-up.

Nikolai puffed on his cigarette, watching the white smoke breeze up to the freezing apartment air. If I wasn't sure he'd smack the shit out of me, I'd tell him not to smoke in my apartment. Though technically, it was both of ours.

"Check the folder," he said.

I looked down at the black coffee table, holding in an annoyed sigh when I noticed another chip in the wood. The guy couldn't stop breaking things. On top of the table sat a manilla envelope. We should have moved past the whole discreet-espionage-thing years ago, but Nikolai liked sticking to his roots.

Lifting up the envelope, I flipped through it.

It seemed pretty standard. He was younger than my usual marks, but I certainly wasn't complaining about the change. I'd grown tired of old men a long time ago.

"He's young," I observed, looking down at the photo.

The guy whose photo stared back at me looked like he was in his mid-twenties at best. Twenty-five, twenty-six, maybe. His hair was untamed atop his head in dark brown waves, slightly shaggy. There was a slight olive tinge to his skin. Wrinkle-free. That was a nice change. In the photo, he stood next to two people. An older woman who looked like his mom, and a younger girl who might have been his sister. Either they were super short, or he was super tall.

"Okay," I eyed Nikolai cautiously. "What's the catch? How is he my next mark?"

Nikolai looked at me, a smirk on his lips as he put his cigarette out on the arm of the couch. Damnit. He knew how much I hated it when he did that.

"That is Maddox. Twenty-six, final year law student, heir to a multi-billion-dollar company," Nikolai said.

Well, I was right on the money with the age, but it still didn't explain what I was supposed to do with him. We didn't go after the heirs; we went right for the money. Literally.

Nikolai noticed I was still confused and sighed out of frustration. "His old man just died. Left the kid the entire empire. Right now, it's being controlled by a conservatorship until he graduates law school and passes the Bar, which is in six months from today. Once that day comes, that money will be his entirely."

It sounded too good to be true. I got six months to work my magic on this Maddox guy? Too easy. Way too easy. "How much money are we talking, Nikolai?"

A sly grin replaced his smirk—I knew that grin. That was his, a shit ton of money, grin. 

"Thirty-five million."

My mouth flew open. That was the biggest number I'd ever heard in my life, and we'd played with some of the big dogs before. None of them were that big. "Are you serious?"

He nodded, "But that's not all of it. The entire company, Aster Holdings LLC, was left to him too. It's a billion-dollar company. He's been running it since his father's passing, and once he passes the Bar, he won't have any more advisors telling him what to do with the company."